


Decanted, Slowly

by karanguni



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-09 02:41:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5522402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wrote Giana, perhaps to spite his father or to mollify himself. Letters about the emptiness of space and other claptrap; when he could bring himself to, he also included a spare drawing or too. Most of it was of military ordinance, <em>because I'm in want of better subjects.</em></p><p>Ges wrote him, like a self-refreshing wound; chipper stories about his Academy days, and then darker ones about the alphas his father was shopping him to and the way they smelled, each scent dissected into notes as though Ges were decanting fine wines.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Decanted, Slowly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yhlee (etothey)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I didn't quite get to the porn, but I got to the, er, dirtybadwrong, maybe?
> 
> General warnings: canon-typical unhappy/angry Aral. While we're at it, canon-typical Ges.

They were presented together, on the occasion of their eighteenth; Vorrutyer House was set ablaze with lights and its doors thrown open to any Vor highblooded enough to warrant an invitation. It was an opportunity to secure rare social and political cachet; a double-opportunity, because Ges and Giana Vorrutyer were twins, first-born siblings to the Count and omegas both.

Aral had been twenty, and on his first leave from the Imperial Academy. The Count his father had barely let his boots cool on the foyer of the house at Vorkosigan Surleau before he'd said, 'Put on your dress greens, boy,' and turned Aral around a second time.

He remembered standing in the wide receiving lobby of Vorrutyer House, champagne in hand as though the drink could whet his patience. The house was dark marbles and darker woods; a set-up, Aral thought, to help set-pieces shine brighter by contrast. He'd been well on his way to a self-prescribed alcohol-induced trance when the music began to die down and the crowds turned to face the ballroom staircase like power-hungry flowers turned to some new sun.

Aral knew that, presentation or not, old Count Vorrutyer would still have kept the twins on some amount of blockers; a slight whiff to let the crowd know they were getting their money's worth was one thing, a pheromonic blast to send half the unattached alphas in the capital to duelling another. So it made no sense that, when Ges Vorrutyer with his laughing eyes descended, one hand on the balustrade, the world should have narrowed to so fine a point of focus.

'Let it be the girl,' murmured his father by his side. 'Yuri did good enough a job of culling us down; you don't need to lend him arms, however passively.'

Aral flinched, but did not pull his gaze. His father followed it. 'Damn it, boy,' Piotr swore quietly. ' _Make_ it be the girl.'

* * *

Aral danced with them both, because he was himself a Count's son, and by the mathematics of Vorbarr Sultana the effects of two first-born children together were multiplicative, not additive. Giana smelt the same as her brother; Ges smelt the same as his sister. But it was to Ges that Aral said, 'It's a shame that you'll have to lose the hair.'

'What, this frilly nonsense?' Ges returned, letting go of Aral's waist for long enough to tug at some brown curl at his forelock. 'Good riddance. Father wants to sell me as a roll-on-my-back omega in hopes that the first alpha who _does_ want to roll me has soft hands and a softer touch.'

'Is that not what you're after?' Aral asked, catching Ges' hand and returning it to place.

'Let me have the Academy,' Ges said, his smile bright. 'Let me be a soldier.'

* * *

Count Piotr wrangled to have them meet, the day after; Ges the chaperone for Giana and the other way around as well so that Aral only had to show up in his civvies and bring gifts and his nose with him.

They still smelled good; Ges still smelled better.

They were all three of them young enough that tea parlour talk soon lost its appeal; they abandoned the little platters with littler sandwiches on them for the music room, where Giana showed off impeccable breeding by starting on the piano, and where Ges showed off his thighs by sprawling across the couch and saying, 'What now, Vorkosigan?'

'If some other alpha comes charging in right this moment,' Aral said, stealing a bare leaf of sheet music and unearthing a stub of a pencil from his pocket, 'I'm sure I'll have to do your father and my father both a goodness by tearing their throats out, belike.'

Giana laughed quietly; her brother less so.

'But until then,' Aral said, peaceably enough as he put the graphite tip down on paper, 'I'll just draw, thank you.'

'Artist, are you?' Ges asked.

'A crude imitation thereof,' Aral replied softly. He didn't need to ask Ges to pose: the man felt to it naturally.

* * *

Count Piotr wrangled to have Aral be back at the Academy - at the occasion of his commissioning, for god's sake - when he sent, like an excellent tactician, the message that Aral's marriage to Giana Vorrutyer was a _fiat accompli_ , that the ink was already dry on the paper.

* * *

His own wedding Aral barely remembered; only that it was at Vorkosigan House; only that Ges was watching from his place on the star, his sister's own second; only the vows that he made, his word as Vorkosigan.

Padma kicked the circle of groats open and released them into new-made captivity; he seized Aral up by the hand and hissed into his ear, 'Cousin, drink it away or batten it down, but by god don't look like you're contemplating patricide on your wedding day.'

* * *

Aral, if nothing else, was good at oaths, and so he took her to bed with gentle hands, and received in return gentle touches. If he closed his eyes, the rising smell of her and the heat of her and the wetness between her legs  could drive the basic biology of him to work. If she resented that as much as he resented it they were both locked into silence together, co-conspirators of sort, and it was enough to make him almost love her.

* * *

Count Piotr also wrangled that he be sent away on his first major posting, no long after. Aral knew on some intellectual level that, Count or not, his father hadn't the power or the means to _make_ it such that he was to go off on ship duty, but it seemed that way, since Piotr had said not long before, 'You've fucked her through three heats and nothing - maybe it's best you go away for a while, before people comment on your performance.'

* * *

He wrote Giana, perhaps to spite his father or to mollify himself. Letters about the emptiness of space and other claptrap; when he could bring himself to, he also included a spare drawing or too. Most of it was of military ordinance, because _I'm in want of better subjects._

Ges wrote him, like a self-refreshing wound; chipper stories about his Academy days, and then darker ones about the alphas his father was shopping him to and the way they smelled, each scent dissected into notes as though Ges were decanting fine wines.

* * *

He came back from ship duty a year later, making port two hours out from Vorbarr Sultana. Aral wasn't ten minutes from disembarkation when his comm buzzed, receiving a message on a delay. ' _Aral for the love of god don't go back to Vorkosigan House today_ ,' Ges' voice said. ' _Come to Vorrutyer House, come to me, just for god's sake don't go there._ '

There was no more; nothing that Ges could say, perhaps. Aral gripped his comm tight enough that the plastic creaked beneath his fingers; but if Ges was presenting this as some sort of choice - between whatever it was in Vorkosigan House, where Giana was, and whatever it was in Vorrutyer House that Ges could offer to protect him from it - Ges was mistaken: there wasn't a choice, not one that Aral could make on his honour.

When he arrived at the House, the armsmen scattered and the staff hid. Aral took the stairs two at a time, and when he made it to his rooms it didn't take a second for the smell - the _smells_ \- to hit him.

Giana was drunk, or drugged, or both, or fucked stupid through a heat that had suppurated through the sheets and what seemed to Aral like the carpets and the drapes and the very fucking _walls._ He could smell them - two of them, both alphas - on her; and if this were ever rape it was too bad a play at it for him to believe it.

'Why?' he asked her, hand creaking on the door where he was gripping it to hard.

She looked at him with brown, brown eyes. 'Why not?' she slurred at him, fighting to close her gown about her: what the point was, Aral could not guess, since it hung off her like torn paper and only added to her disgracefulness, his anger. There was Ges' thrown-off jacket in the corner that he recognised; he must have come in at some point, tried to clear the scene, failed, and left.

'Why!' Aral roared, too angry now for logical considerations.

'Why _not_ \- why not, when you're never around, when you don't -' she screamed at him, the words cutting worse than small, sharp knives. Then she put her hands to her face and sobbed and Aral couldn't look at her, couldn't stay in this room with its smells and its stained silk sheets.

He turned, and ran.

* * *

He called Ges. 'Who were they?' he growled, and Ges wasn't his, but he put power and authority into his voice and felt the honesty in the answer when Ges replied.

'There were two of them,' said Ges. 'Vorkalloner, and Vorkingt.'

Aral snapped off the line before he could be convinced to act wisely.

* * *

He killed Vorkingt first, who looked at him head-on. Vorkalloner was harder; he pushed the man down and brought him up again and then pushed the man down and brought him up again, but nothing would make his back bend.

'Watch yourself, Vorkosigan,' is all Vorkalloner said to him before Aral lost his patience. 'You don't know where you're going, with this one.'

By the end of it his hands were bloodied and he was lost. He did what he could to clean himself off, but the blood-stench stuck, at least in his senses. Aral could not, would not go back, so he took a turn left when he should have turned right, and went into Vorrutyer House, up the back way he'd learned to use before this all had gone to hell.

* * *

'I need,' he said, bursting in on Ges' room, 'to use...' Aral trailed off.

Ges was on his couch and in repose, his jacket off, the cream of his uniform undershirt just as dirty as - no, dirtier than - Giana's robe had been. There were marks on his chest; finger-prints and scratches. He stank. God, he stank, same as his sister, exactly the same.

The chips fell into place, and a red rage simmered down into the marrow of Aral's bones.

'What have you done?' he asked Ges, who smelled like everything he wanted. He strode forward and seized Ges by his shirt, and pulled him upright and close. Ges' pants weren't done up, and the fingers of his left hand were sticky from where he'd been playing with himself. They were wet and Aral could still smell the other men on them; he wondered, if he concentrated, if he could smell Giana, too. He couldn't. He couldn't. Couldn't think of Ges orchestrating this with a soldier's touch; couldn't think of Ges letting them fuck him and his sister (his  _wife_ ), packaged up like a discount deal; couldn't think of Ges wandering back through the streets of the capital, reeking and sober and proud.

Ges lifted his hand and ran it down the side of Aral's face. 'I gave you a choice,' Ges said, when Aral was done flinching. 'Now come into the shower. There's none of this that won't wash off.'


End file.
